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“The world around us is changing in ways that may have profound effects on the emergency management enterprise. Collectively, we must begin to think more broadly and over a longer timeframe if we are to understand these changes and their potential impacts. To this end, FEMA has launched a Strategic Foresight initiative (SFI), the objective of which is straightforward: to seek to understand how the world around us is changing and how those changes may affect the future of emergency management and our community…

“The SFI can serve as one important tool in the development of both strategy and plans. By understanding the potential future environment, organizations will better understand and anticipate risk while ensuring opportunities can be fully capitalized. For example, the SFI may identify new or increasing capability requirements as well as emerging capabilities that do not exist today. Such identifications could support decisions about future investments as well as planning activities and exercises. In a more indirect manner, the SFI can help establish a research agenda for the emergency management field by highlighting areas of emerging relevance and the key questions that remain unanswered.”

[On March 1, 2003, FEMA became part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.]

The BBC futures document is a careful and thoughtful piece of work, making bold foresight-oriented moves: saying, essentially, what are we here for? To provide quality media in the public interest. So what do we need to do/make/change to achieve it, that is, to deliver on our core mission, in the years ahead?
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To this end, the blueprint talks about “setting new boundaries:
• Recognising the lead role that commercial radio plays in serving popular music to 30-50 year-old audiences, through the proposed closure of 6 Music and the refocusing of Radio 1 and Radio 2
• Recognising the lead role that Channel 4 and other broadcasters can play in addressing the gap in public service television for younger teenagers, through the closure of targeted teen propositions
• Reducing spending on programmes from abroad by 20%, from £100m today to £80m in 2013, capping it thereafter at this level of 2.5p in every licence fee pound
• Setting a limit on what the BBC can spend on sports rights at an average of 9p in every licence fee pound
• Leaving room for local newspapers and others to develop in a digital world by keeping the BBC’s current pattern of local services, and not launching new services in England at any more local a level than today
• Focusing original content on BBC Online on the (five) content priorities only, and excluding whole categories of online activity such as web search, communications and non-content related social networking.”

Further in the document it talks about “a set of web-native activities that the BBC itself will not undertake, including:
• The BBC’s search activity will be limited to its own website and associated external links; it will not do general web search for all-web content
• It will not run its own general communications services such as email, webmail or instant messaging
• It will not create stand-alone social networking sites, with any social propositions on the BBC site only there to aid engagement with BBC content. The BBC will also ensure that its social activity works with external social networks
• There will be no specialist content for a specialist audience, such as business-critical information in specialist fields, legal, financial (including trading tools) or other professional content.”
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From the beeb’s perspective, it makes perfect sense. It can’t be the best at everything to everyone. That just means it will be working at the limits of its reach in many areas, against focused competitors, which dilutes its brand, and of course spending public money on commercial services already relatively well catered to.

The politics of engagement

It’s business strategy 101, and if it were a business that would be that. But the BBC is a multi-stakeholder public service body, and therein lies the rub. Everyone has a say in its future. And different stakeholders have different ideas of what is ‘in the public interest’: many think commercial radio etc., is in their interest, so protest is mounting, particularly among younger users under banners that read ‘BBC turns it’ back on a generation’ and so on. Twitter is humming.

Good multi-stakeholder future work requires engagement and consultation, and the BBC is offering a consultative process — from now until May 25 — see the page at https://consultations.external.bbc.co.uk

The future? Let’s not mince words that are usually minced. The future is political. That is part of the reason prediction is done so poorly — people miss the fact or extent of contention over outcomes, even ones you would think are in everyone’s interest (mitigating climate change, for example.)

When there are many interested parties with different interests, and therefore contending claims on the future — different visions of the ‘ideal’ future — the flavor of the future (in total or in compromise) will belong to the interest with the stronger hand. So depending on the power of the stakeholders soon-to-be-unhappy, the BBC will be forced to bend or not. But in the hardball world of multistakeholder change, chances are the Director General has set his stall out a bit further than he need to, and will be able to ‘compromise’ to a position that is more or less the plan. Good futuring all round.

So this stimulates me to put down a few thoughts about risk assessment and its relationship with industry and strategic foresight as a whole. This is a big topic of course, but seeing as the categories are confused a lot, it’s worth tackling even if just in summary terms.

When I reach the topic of Risk Assessment in my ‘Industry Foresight and Business Future Strategy’ MBA elective, I use the ‘Adidas-Salomon: Incorporating Risk into Corporate Strategy’ mini-case [Ref: ICFAI 304-141-1; sourced via Cranfield’s Case Clearing house.]

The case is a useful baseline in risk assessment because it describes the various risks a multinational company typically faces: marketing risks (market change, brand image); operations risks (quality; reliability of processes and suppliers); social & environmental risks (workforce & natural resources compliance); legal (liability, regulation, patent); information technology (compromise or disruption); and financial risks (currency, interest rate, credit).

Business disruptors
In sum these are the things that could damage or disrupt the business. Isolating such factors, keeping vigilance over them, and having thought through or enacted counter-measures in advance, allows the organization to better control or reduce the impact should risk become reality.

All risks are future events, so a risk assessment is undoubtedly a future study, but assuming a company looks diligently across all these categories for potential and emerging hazards, how prepared is it for a changing world? What kind of industry foresight does this give managers? Is a risk assessment a futures assessment?

The obvious first answer is that a risk assessment is only half the equation. It’s oriented to the downside potential of changes not the upside; looking for threats not opportunities. Obviously that means that opportunities are less likely to be identified.

The second thing is that a standard risk assessment operates in the realm of known risks, in known categories, that may cause disruption and damage in a known way. It doesn’t have the mechanism to expand conceptions of what could go wrong, or how it could go wrong, or what the full knock-on effects will be. The types of mental-model-expanding techniques that fuller foresight offers are not built into a typical risk assessment.

Strategy questions
Third, risk assessments never really broach the question: is the business idea or business model good and will it keep on being good? That is, what products or services will be appropriate going forward, or how will models of supply or manufacture or marketing or fulfillment need to change, due to technology change or shifting consumer preferences.

In other words, risk assessment doesn’t ask strategic questions of managers. It is part of the day-to-day management vigilance necessary with reference to the future – the hygiene factors in running an organization. It is about keeping the business going as is, not about changing it for a changing word.

There’s nothing wrong with this. The point is, it’s just ‘first base’ in building a quality view of the future, and therein a robust point-of-view about what to do next. Although no doubt companies such as Google or Apple or Virgin, etc., assess and mitigate their risks, they didn’t become successful in their future by doing risk assessment and saying ‘That’s it, were done. We’re ready for the future.”